Second language acquisition of Chinese directional complement constructions under usage-based approaches

Chinese directional complement (DC) constructions pose challenges for second language (L2) Chinese learners (Wu, 2011; Yang, 2003). Chinese DCs (e.g., shàng 上 up, jìn 进 into) are used to indicate the direction in which people or objects move as a result of a displacement (Li & Thompson, 1981). Little is known about L2 Chinese learners’ acquisition of figurative DCs and their comprehension of literal and figurative uses of DCs. The current study aimed to fill this gap by examining both the comprehension and production of literal and figurative uses of DCs of different syntactic types by L2 Chinese learners through a situation-cued sentence completion test, grammaticality judgment test, and post-test interview. Results of the 103 Chinese learners’performance on the two tests and 16 learners’ perspectives in the interviews revealed that L2 Chinese learners’ acquisition of DC constructions was affected by the syntactic complexity of DC constructions, whether DCs were used literally or figuratively, and learners’ experience with their first language. The findings of the current study have implications for teaching Chinese DC constructions. In the initial stage, Chinese instructors should teach DC constructions as cohrenet lexical chunks with the help of many examples to demonstrate the usage of them. In the following stage, instructors could introduce the function of the individual DCs and teach the compositionality of DC constructions.